Mali – Hot Airhttp://hotair.com
The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkSat, 10 Dec 2016 01:41:13 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432Kerry: We neutralized al-Qaeda and will do so faster to ISIShttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/20/kerry-we-neutralized-al-qaeda-and-will-do-so-faster-to-isis/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/20/kerry-we-neutralized-al-qaeda-and-will-do-so-faster-to-isis/#commentsFri, 20 Nov 2015 17:01:55 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3884774The poor timing of Obama administration declarations continues today. Last night, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to bolster confidence in Barack Obama’s ISIS strategy by drawing a parallel to the fight against al-Qaeda and ask for just a little more patience. Kerry declared that the US had “neutralized them as an effective force,” and that the US was on track to do the same to ISIS even more quickly:

We’re confident that if we stay steady, and our heads in thinking creatively but also being strog and committed to our fundamental value, we’re going to defeat Daesh. We began our fight against al-Qaeda in 2001 and it took us quite a few years before we were able to eliminate Osama bin Laden and their leasership and neutralize them as an effective force. So hopefully we will be able to do Daesh much faster than that.

There’s a problem with this analysis, which is that ISIS in fact was part of al-Qaeda, and only its declaration of a caliphate ended that connection. Prior to 2011, the group called itself Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and publicly aligned with bin Laden and Zawahiri. Its original leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, launched the group (then called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad) under the auspices of bin Laden in 1999, when the AQ leader was still operating out of Afghanistan. (More on that history can be found here.) The Bush administration had all but neutralized this AQ subsidiary with the Anbar Awakening and the surge in 2007-8, but the Obama administration’s decision to leave Iraq — after declaring victory and an end to the war — provided AQI with the room to expand and declare an Islamic caliphate.

And actually, there’s another problem with this analysis, which is that ISIS isn’t the only al-Qaeda affiliate to not be “neutralized.” One took credit for today’s attack in Mali — making Kerry’s declaration obviously false:

It’s stunning that Kerry would claim this. It was just a couple of years ago that AQIM nearly sacked Mali; it took a French military intervention to defeat them. Both ISIS and al-Qaeda now operate openly in Libya, where Ansar al-Sharia — the group that claimed credit for the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi — operates as AQ’s arm. The same goes for Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, one of the factions on the ground in the civil war. The connecting thread between all three states: they all failed under the Obama administration’s foreign policy within the last four years.

On CBS News this morning, a former FBI counterterrorism expert told viewers that it was likely that the operation was almost certainly an AQ operation. “The state of al-Qaeda is strong,” Ali Soufan said, and that he worries equally about AQ and ISIS:

“ISIS is a symptom of the disease,” Soufan says. “Al-Qaeda is the disease.” Don’t tell the White House, though; it disturbs the fantasy they’re spinning about victory.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/20/kerry-we-neutralized-al-qaeda-and-will-do-so-faster-to-isis/feed/743884774Radical Islamists take 170 hostages at Mali luxury hotel Special forces rescuing hostageshttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/20/radical-islamists-take-170-hostage-at-mali-luxury-hotel/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/20/radical-islamists-take-170-hostage-at-mali-luxury-hotel/#commentsFri, 20 Nov 2015 13:01:25 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3884738This is a big one. An unknown number of terrorists shouting Allahu Akbar have taken control of the Radisson Blu hotel in the capital of Mali. Three people have been reported dead in the attack and a huge number of hostages have been taken, estimated at 150 guests and thirty employees. According to NBC News, the hostages include “U.S. Government employees,” but there are no specifics as to who they might be or which department they work for. (Reuters)

Islamist gunmen stormed a luxury hotel packed with foreigners in Mali’s capital Bamako on Friday, taking 170 hostages in a former French colony that has been battling rebels allied with al Qaeda for several years.

A senior security source said some of the hostages had been freed after being made to recite verses from the Koran. The French newspaper Le Monde quoted the Malian security ministry as saying at least three hostages had been killed.

The raid on the Radisson Blu hotel, which lies just west of the city center near government ministries and diplomatic offices in the former French colony, comes a week after Islamic State militants killed 129 people in Paris.

The identity of the Bamako gunmen, or the group to which they belong, is not known.

I suppose Reuters feels obligated to say that the identify of the group is not known at this point but it probably wouldn’t take much guesswork to narrow it down. (And which branch of Global Muslim Terror Incorporated is responsible probably doesn’t matter all that much anymore.) CNN has witnesses on the scene who report that hostages were not just made to recite passages from the Koran, but those who were able to do so from memory were released. This could turn into a standoff which stretches into the weekend.

This is hardly the first time Mali has had trouble with the local flavor of Al-Qaida. Just a few months ago there were nearly a dozen Mali soldiers killed when AQ terrorists attacked a military post in the norther portion of the country. (The Guardian)

Mali’s government has said eleven soldiers were killed on Monday in a terrorist attack on a camp in the northern Timbuktu region, reportedly claimed by Al-Qaida’s front group in the region.

Jihadist attacks have long been concentrated in Mali’s north, but began spreading at the beginning of the year to the centre of the country, and in June to the south near the borders with Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso.

“Unidentified gunmen attacked a security post of the Mali National Guard” early Monday morning in Gourma-Rharous, an area around 140 kilometres (90 miles) east of Timbuktu, a government statement said.

In May, five more people were killed during an attack on a popular restaurant in the same city. The French still maintain a large military presence in the western African nation, but they’ve clearly got their hands full.

The target selection, being a symbol of “western decadence” and all, along with the prioritization of taking non-Muslims as hostages make this a fairly textbook operation these days. As of 7:30 this morning NBC News is reporting that 80 hostages had been released, presumably those who passed muster as Muslims. The White House can keep claiming that we’re not fighting a holy war, but somebody needs to tell these guys. They’re clearly fighting an (un)holy war against us. I’m sure there will be more updates throughout the day because Mali security forces are moving in already to attempt to effect a rescue.

UPDATE: Special forces have moved in to rescue the hostages.

Malian special forces have entered the Radisson Blu Hotel in the capital, Bamako, to try to free hostages taken after it was stormed by gunmen.

The hotel says 138 people remain inside. The gunmen stormed it shooting and shouting “God is great!” in Arabic, eyewitnesses say…

The US Department of Defense told the BBC that US special forces were “currently assisting hostage recovery efforts”.

A US official said around 25 military personnel were in Bamako at the time of the attack and that some of them are helping “with moving civilians to secured locations, while Malian forces clear the hotel of hostile gunmen”.

Six Americans are reported to have been rescued.

France’s defence ministry says its special forces are also on site at the hotel.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/20/radical-islamists-take-170-hostage-at-mali-luxury-hotel/feed/1743884738Former US ambassador to Syria: I couldn’t defend US policy any longerhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/03/former-us-ambassador-to-syria-i-couldnt-defend-us-policy-any-longer/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/03/former-us-ambassador-to-syria-i-couldnt-defend-us-policy-any-longer/#commentsTue, 03 Jun 2014 19:21:07 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=310344US Ambassador Robert Ford resigned from his State Department post a month ago, after a long and difficult time as the envoy to Syria. Ford showed great personal courage in his service while Bashar al-Assad instigated attacks on Western embassies and eventually provoked a massive civil war which has turned into a regional threat, thanks to the collapse of his power in large regions of Syria. The collapse of American policy in Syria over the past year was presumed to have prompted Ford’s departure, which he confirms with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview today.

This is interesting for more than just the rebuke to the aimless foreign policy of the Obama administration, though:

“I was no longer in a position where I felt I could defend the American policy,” he said. “We have been unable to address either the root causes of the conflict in terms of the fighting on the ground and the balance on the ground, and we have a growing extremism threat.” …

“There really is nothing we can point to that’s been very successful in our policy except the removal of about ninety-three percent of some of Assad’s chemical materials. But now he’s using chlorine gas against his opponents.”

At the beginning of Syria’s conflict, the U.S. State Department – including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – pushed hard for America to provide robust support for the moderate opposition; that recommendation was not borne out.

This seems to hint at a disconnect on Syria between the Hillary Clinton State Department and the John Kerry State Department, which has focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict much more than the Syrian civil war. There probably isn’t much of a disconnect, though, even if there is a difference in focus. Obama blew whatever political capital he had for an intervention in Syria by drawing and then erasing his “red line,” and ended up surrendering control of the situation to Vladimir Putin.

The idea of intervention keeps coming up, but Ford was right to get out when he did. The recent Obama pivot on foreign policy was supposed to set the stage for a more activist policy, but Obama so thoroughly booted it that he ended up arguing against an intervention — and inadvertently validated the Iraq War.

This part of Ford’s remarks (not included in the video clip) contains its own possibly unintended but devastating criticism of the Obama/Hillary foreign policy in Libya. Ford’s talking about Syria and Assad, but it’s not exactly rocket science to apply this to the US-led effort to topple Moammar Qaddafi:

Assad “physically does not control two-thirds of Syria,” Ford said. “And we warned even as long as two years ago that terrorist groups would go into that vacuum, as we had seen in places like Afghanistan and Somalia and Yemen and Mali.”

“This is not rocket science. In a place where there is no government control, terrorist groups can infiltrate in and set up places where they can operate freely.”

“And we warned this would happen in Syria, and it has.”

Two years ago, by the way, was before the Benghazi attack, and Mali specifically resulted from creating the failed state in Libya. Ford’s criticism goes directly to the heart of the Obama/Hillary foreign policy decision to decapitate the Qaddafi regime without controlling the situation on the ground. It will be interesting to see how many others connect the dots on this argument, even if Ford may not have intended to do so himself.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/03/former-us-ambassador-to-syria-i-couldnt-defend-us-policy-any-longer/feed/48310344British defense analyst blasts Obama military and foreign policies as “clueless”http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/16/british-defense-analyst-blasts-obama-military-and-foreign-policies-as-clueless/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/16/british-defense-analyst-blasts-obama-military-and-foreign-policies-as-clueless/#commentsThu, 16 Jan 2014 17:01:37 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=293687This comes not from an armchair analyst, but a senior adviser to the British military — our closest allies in war and diplomacy. Sir Hew Strachan doesn’t think highly of George Bush’s foreign policies and war strategies, but as he says, at least Bush had strategies. Barack Obama … not so much:

President Obama is “chronically incapable” of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain’s most senior military advisors.

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels “has left them in a far worse position than they were before.”

Strachan, a current member of the Chief of the Defense Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, cited the “crazy” handling of the Syrian crisis as the most egregious example of a fundamental collapse in military planning that began in the aftermath of 9/11. “If anything it’s gone backwards instead of forwards, Obama seems to be almost chronically incapable of doing this. Bush may have had totally fanciful political objectives in terms of trying to fight a global War on Terror, which was inherently astrategic, but at least he had a clear sense of what he wanted to do in the world. Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,” he said.

Strachan is particularly disenchanted with Obama’s handling of Syria and the red lines for chemical weapons use, as the Daily Mail reports:

‘What he’s done in talking about Red Lines in relation to Syria has actually devalued the deterrent effect of American military capability and it seems to me that creates an unstable situation, because if he were act it would surprise everybody,’ he said.

‘I think the other issue is that in starting and stopping with Assad, he’s left those who might be his natural allies in Syria with nowhere to go. He’s increased the likelihood that if there is a change of regime in Syria that it will be an Islamic fundamentalist one.’

This conclusion should hardly surprise anyone. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report states the same thing, although the committee unsurprisingly left that as an implication than an explicit condemnation. The disaster in Benghazi didn’t start on September 11, 2012, or even December 2011 when State first waived security requirements for our consulate in the city. It began when Obama led NATO into decapitating the Qaddafi regime without any thought or provision for what would happen afterward, and then blithely ignored the reality on the ground as the rest of the Western nations packed up and left Benghazi.

In my column today for The Fiscal Times, I point out that the conclusion of ultimate responsibility is painfully obvious, as is the real reason for the debacle in Libya and North Africa:

One does not need a name at the top of this report to know where responsibility rests for this massive failure. Hillary Clinton ran State, Leon Panetta ran Defense, and David Petraeus ran the CIA. But the distributed nature of the failure indicts the Obama administration and Barack Obama himself, too. The White House is responsible for interagency coordination, for one thing, especially when it comes to national security and diplomatic enterprises.

However, Obama’s responsibility extends farther and more specifically, too. The reason that eastern Libya had transformed into a terrorist haven in the first place was because of the Obama-led NATO intervention that deposed Moammar Qaddafi without any effort to fill the security vacuum his abrupt departure created.

Four months before the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Daniel Larison warned that the vacuum left by that 30,000-foot intervention not only meant trouble for the West in eastern Libya, but throughout North Africa as al Qaeda and its affiliates entrenched themselves. Sure enough, al Qaeda infused itself into a Tuareg rebellion and almost topped Mali, an effort which France belatedly stamped out with a boots-on-the-ground intervention – with those boots transported in part by the US Air Force. At the time, theFinancial Times called Mali “among the most embarrassing boomerangs” of American policy, specifically noting “the blowback in the Sahel from the overthrow of Colonel Moammar Gaddafi in Libya.”

The policies and actions of the Obama administration in Libya left behind a failed state, and the incompetent handling of security and readiness afterward left four Americans to die needlessly. The buck stops at the top for this mess.

The talking-points controversy was always strangely misdirected—in part because, as this report makes clear, there is a lot that was substantively wrong with the way things were managed in Benghazi. That is true particularly if the subject of discussion is Hillary Clinton. She does not come out well in this report, in any part, although the Republican minority is more florid in its criticisms. The State Department made mistakes when she was its leader. One of the findings is that nothing changed even when “tripwires” meant to prompt an increase in security or suspension in operations had been crossed, and people in the Department knew it.

Why not? She doesn’t really have an answer; in the past, she has deflected questions by pointing out that Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who died in Benghazi, was someone she knew well and cared about; there is no doubt that he was. Despite her performance at a hearing last year, when she wondered why exactly what happened really mattered, callous indifference is not the answer here. (That won’t stop the clip of her testimony from playing in political ads if she runs for President.) But her reluctance to change course may have been influenced by her heavy investment in the decision to take military action in Libya; the former defense secretary Robert Gates writes in his new memoir that hers was the voice that swayed the balance. (Joe Biden was on the other side.) Libya was one of the things she had managed in her stint as Secretary of State, for which she had been so praised. Also, again, Libya was supposed to be something we were done with; now it will be a question Hillary Clinton has to contend with in 2016, and, in fairness, rightly so.

This is something Obama has to answer for, too. He made the decision to intervene militarily in Libya without invoking the War Powers Act—and that, and not some phantom version of the talking points, is the purloined letter in this case. …

By saying that he didn’t have to get Congress’s permission because whatever we were doing didn’t rise to the level of “hostilities,” he was willing it to always be so. There was no challenge then, but there also wasn’t the kind of consent that might have put some check on the most partisan extremes in the fight about Benghazi now. Obama and his advisers had decided beforehand that this was limited, and wouldn’t go wrong; and then it did.

And to this day, they still won’t acknowledge that failure. That’s why four Americans died in Benghazi — because the Obama administration wasn’t willing to admit that Obama’s grand scheme to intervene in Libya had turned it into a disastrous failed state and a haven for al-Qaeda, even when the CIA and DoD were warning them of it, which is noted fully in the SSCI report. It’s hubris stacked on incompetence, and Strachan is hardly the only one to have noticed this combination.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/16/british-defense-analyst-blasts-obama-military-and-foreign-policies-as-clueless/feed/105293687France: We must use force against Assad if chemical-weapons use is provenhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/22/france-we-must-use-force-against-assad-if-chemical-weapons-use-is-proven/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/22/france-we-must-use-force-against-assad-if-chemical-weapons-use-is-proven/#commentsThu, 22 Aug 2013 13:21:16 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=275949The deaths of hundreds in a Damascus suburb have Western leaders talking retribution. Syrian rebels claim that the Syrian army used chemical weapons against both the rebels and civilians in the area, while the Bashar al-Assad government vehemently denies this. Today, France’s foreign minister demanded a show of force if the use of chemical weapons can be proven by UN investigators already on the ground — even if the UN finds itself impotent:

France’s foreign minister said Thursday that “a reaction of force must be taken” if Syrian activists’ claims that the government has used chemical weapons outside the capital, Damascus, are confirmed.

France’s foreign minister said Thursday that force must be used reaction of force must be taken” if Syrian activists’ claims that the government has used chemical weapons outside the capital, Damascus, are confirmed. …

Hours after the closed-door meeting, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told CNN affiliate BFMTV that “force” was needed if the allegations were true.

“If the U.N. Security Council cannot do it, decisions will be made otherwise,” Fabius said. But, he said, sending ground troops to Syria is out of question.

Why? Shooting a cruise missile to hit an army barracks might sound like a big rebuke to Assad, but it’s not going to change the calculus of the war. In fact, it won’t even change the calculus of the use of chemical weapons, by either side. A momentary attack with no follow-up will only allow Western leaders to convince themselves that they’ve done something, even though they will have done nothing at all.

Or, perhaps, M. Fabius has more in mind a concerted air campaign designed to force the collapse of the Assad regime. If that sounds familiar, it’s because France, the UK, and the US combined to do just that in Libya. How’s that working out for the West? Even more pertinently, how did it work out for France? They had to put boots on the ground in Mali to stop an al-Qaeda takeover that was launched from the failed state of Libya, thanks to our decapitation of the Qaddafi regime and its control over the eastern part of the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is getting ready to seize chemical weapons, anywhere in the world. CBS News’ David Martin went on a training mission with the famous Army unit, the 82nd Airborne.

In the early morning hours recently, paratroopers training at Fort Bragg, N.C., conducted an assault on a compound where they’d been told chemical agents are stored. After a decade of fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was a new mission for the soldiers in Col. Mike Fenzel’s brigade. Fenzel told CBS News, “It’s one that we haven’t really addressed over the last 12 years because we have been focused on Afghanistan and Iraq.

It was just an exercise, but Maj. Gen. John Nicholson, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, said it was designed to deal with a real world threat. Nicholson said, “As we look at the evolving situation in Syria and other places around the world, we’re preparing to deal with the reality of securing chemical weapons.”

The 82nd Airborne is kept on constant alert, ready to load and launch 1,000 paratroopers and their gear within 18 hours to anywhere in the world.

Bloomberg makes a good point about the credibility of the US and “red lines”:

Dempsey and the White House are right not to want to own another conflict in the Middle East. Yet failure to react also has repercussions, in Syria and beyond. Why should Iran, or indeedEgypt’s new military rulers, take U.S. commitments and red lines at face value? In addition,Syria looks set for years of continued civil war in which each side is supplied by regional backers, and spillover to Syria’s neighbors is inevitable. It can’t be in U.S. interests for this war to include chemical weapons.

Nor do Dempsey’s justified concerns about the nature of Syria’s opposition preclude action. The U.S. should accompany any response to a proven use of chemical weapons by Assad with a clear statement of its policy goal in Syria: not to topple the regime or ensure victory for part or all of the opposition, but to force the main parties to a cease-fire. There are ways to do this short of a full-scale U.S. intervention, and an internationally endorsed statement of these limited goals would help to guard against mission creep. …

As Dempsey’s letter makes clear, the administration has chosen a noninterventionist policy in Syria. Almost exactly one year ago, Obama said that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

Today’s allegations, when figured into that calculus, may soon demand a more forceful response. Whether it is cruise missiles against Syria’s air force or another military option, it is a response the president — and the rest of the world — should be prepared to deliver.

Cruise missiles against Syria’s air force won’t do anything to change the calculus in this fight, either. Assad is using traditional artillery, not air power, against the rebels. We’ll get back to the red-line credibility argument in a moment, but before we do that, shouldn’t we first find out whether it’s been crossed at all?

Two questions are raised by reports of this attack. The first, of course, is whether it happened the way Syrian rebels said it happened. That is why immediately dispatching the UN team, already in-country, to the affected areas is so vital. If this process worked the way it should, they would be there already. If the Syrian regime denies the UN inspectors permission to visit these areas, well, that is kind of an answer in itself.

The second question is, why would the Assad regime launch its biggest chemical attack on rebels and civilians precisely at the moment when a UN inspection team was parked in Damascus? The answer to that question is easy: Because Assad believes that no one — not the UN, not President Obama, not other Western powers, not the Arab League — will do a damn thing to stop him.

There is a good chance he is correct.

Shooting a cruise missile or two won’t stop Assad, if he actually used chemical weapons in the first place. It will take a large ground force to disarm both sides, if we don’t just aim for securing the chemical weapons, and even the latter mission will require tens of thousands of troops to execute properly.

Finally, we do have an interest in enforcing red lines when we draw them. However, we don’t have an interest in making the situation worse than it already is by helping al-Qaeda seize Syria, nor do we help ourselves when our response is nothing short of impotent and irrelevant. If we are not prepared to go big and go for the long term, then we should stay home — and take care in the future not to speak loudly and carry a twig when dealing with the Middle East.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/22/france-we-must-use-force-against-assad-if-chemical-weapons-use-is-proven/feed/154275949Libya defense minister quits as “militias” blockade gov’t officeshttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/07/libya-defense-minister-quits-as-militias-blockade-govt-offices/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/07/libya-defense-minister-quits-as-militias-blockade-govt-offices/#commentsTue, 07 May 2013 14:41:40 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=259152While the House Oversight Committee prepares to hear testimony from three whistleblowers that may expose a cover-up in the Obama administration, the Libyans have their own problems after the “liberation” provided by Barack Obama and NATO’s air campaign. After a blockade of government offices in the capital of Tripoli by armed “militias” for more than a week, the defense minister resigned today in capitulation to their demands:

Libya’s defense minister resigned as gunmen extended their siege of ministries in Tripoli for a second day, demanding the government’s resignation and tougher rules to bar Muammar Qaddafi-era officials from state jobs.

Mohammed Al-Barghathi, a fighter pilot during the Qaddafi era, quit because of events during the past two days, the official Libya News Agency reported, without giving further details. On May 5, Libya’s parliament passed the so-called Isolation Law, which bars from office senior officials who served under Qaddafi for at least 10 years. The law comes into effect on June 5.

Militiamen with machine guns and anti-aircraft weapons began blockading the Foreign and Interior ministries on April 28, demanding that parliament pass the law. The siege was raised on May 5, then resumed and extended to other ministries after gunmen rejected the measure.

Libya is mired in unrest two years after the ouster of Qaddafi, with militias across the country refusing to disarm and Islamists on the rise in the oil-producing east. The ability of the gunmen to lay siege to state institutions highlights the weakness of the central government and its security forces.

In other words, the central government is being held hostage to “militias” in its own capital. What does that tell us about their ability to enforce their writ in the rest of Libya? If they can’t even clear the streets to protect their own institutions in Tripoli, then Libya has become a failed state.

And just who are these “militias,” anyway? Bloomberg doesn’t say, but it suffices to point out that even the Muslim Brotherhood party in the legislature supported the Isolation Law. That means the militias in play here are more radical than the Muslim Brotherhood. Who might those be?

The Ansar al Sharia Brigade, the Islamist terror group linked to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, continues to operate freely in that Libyan city, according to U.S. military officials.

The group remains active in the Mediterranean port city, operating patrols and checkpoints, and earlier this year reached an agreement with other Islamist groups allowing it to operate openly, said military officials familiar with intelligence reports from North Africa.

The group “continues to spread its ideology in the Benghazi area, particularly targeting youth,” said one official, who noted that the lack of central government security was the key reason the militia has not been suppressed.

This is what happens when you decapitate a dictatorial regime in North Africa without having boots on the ground. It’s why we ended up losing our consulate in Benghazi last September in a well-coordinated series of attacks that left four Americans dead. It’s why al-Qaeda nearly seized control of Mali, which took a French invasion to roll back. And it’s why the Obama administration wanted to tell practically any other story rather than the truth last September, as I wrote today in my column at The Week, which is worth mentioning again even after my previous post:

The administration’s intervention in Libya created a power vacuum in eastern Libya, which it refused to acknowledge, and which eventually led not just to this attack but the near-sacking of Mali, which was prevented only by the French military. Instead, State under Clinton reduced the security at this outpost while our allies fled the city, even while nearby terrorist attacks increased. No one in State or the White House prepared for the obvious al Qaeda interest in attacking vulnerable American assets on the anniversary of 9/11. When the inevitable happened, rather than putting all our assets in play to fight the terrorists, the first impulse of Obama and Clinton seems to have been to deny that a terrorist attack had taken place at all as a means of covering up the gross incompetence of the past year in Libya.

Had the Obama administration told the truth last year, Obama probably still would have won the election; most voters weren’t that concerned about Benghazi itself. The attempt to cover up the attack and silence witnesses that finally get to speak out this week will do a lot more damage now and in the future to Obama and Hillary Clinton than the truth would have created last fall. But the real damage will last for years in the failed state Obama and Clinton created in North Africa.

Update: Al-Bargathi has rescinded his resignation, but the Isolation Law will mean he’s out of a job eventually, anyway. Meanwhile, his Defense Ministry can’t even defend the street of its own headquarters.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/07/libya-defense-minister-quits-as-militias-blockade-govt-offices/feed/29259152WaPo fact checker: Who rewrote the Benghazi talking points?http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/07/wapo-fact-checker-who-rewrote-the-talking-points/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/07/wapo-fact-checker-who-rewrote-the-talking-points/#commentsTue, 07 May 2013 14:01:17 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=259146Give Glenn Kessler credit; he was almost alone among the mainstream media in immediately calling Susan Rice’s explanation of the attack on the Benghazi consulate fishy, awarding her two Pinocchios at the time. (Perhaps not too much credit, says Ann Althouse, via Instapundit.) Should that get bumped up now that whistleblowers are prepared to blow the Obama administration’s fairy tale on Benghazi out of the water? Kessler argues, correctly, that the better question is who crafted the four-Pinocchio lie, and to what purpose:

Some readers have suggested we should boost the Pinocchio rating for Rice’s comments. Still, it is clear Rice was simply mouthing the words given to her. The bigger mystery now is who was involved in writing — and rewriting — the talking points.

The talking points have become important because, in the midst of President Obama’s reelection campaign, for a number of days they helped focus the journalistic narrative on an anti-Islam video — and away from a preplanned attack. As we noted in our timeline of administration statements, it took two weeks for the White House to formally acknowledge that Obama believed the attack was terrorism. …

The version as of Friday morning, Sept. 14, 2012, was rather fulsome, saying that “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack” and mentioning the militant group Ansar al-Sharia.

But a senior State Department official — identified by the Weekly Standard as State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland — strongly objected to this draft. The CIA made some changes but apparently it was not enough. Nuland said in an e-mail that the edits did not “resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership” and that the State Department’s leadership “was consulting with [National Security Staff.]”

Minutes later, a White House official (said to be Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications) e-mailed to say that the State Department’s concerns would need to be addressed and the issue would be resolved at a meeting the next day at the White House.

The result, after the meeting, was a wholesale rewriting of the talking points. The House report says “the actual edits, including deleting all references to al-Qaeda, were made by a current high-ranking CIA official,” which the Weekly Standard identifies as Deputy Director Mike Morell.

Oddly, in November, three GOP senators released a statement saying that Morell had told them that the references to al-Qaeda had been removed by the FBI — but then six hours later the CIA contacted them to say Morell “misspoke” and instead the CIA had actually made those deletions. His own apparent role appears not to have been mentioned.

Kessler’s right, but his scope is too narrow. The rewrite has always appeared to be a cover-up from the White House and/or State Department — and make no mistake, the CIA wouldn’t be carrying water for Hillary Clinton and State. The big question is: what were they trying to cover? In my column for The Week, I argue that the context is much broader, and it’s perhaps even more relevant today than ever:

Recall that the attack took place in the middle of the general election, just a couple of weeks after the party conventions. Obama and the Democrats had just argued that the administration’s foreign-policy successes, including the intervention in Libya, showed that America had a steady and seasoned commander-in-chief, and that voters should think twice before electing an untried Mitt Romney.

On the ground in Benghazi, however, the truth was that the sudden vacuum of power had liberated not eastern Libya but the Islamist terrorist networks that had long operated there. Militias competed with the weak central government’s forces for control of Benghazi, and terrorists ran much of what lay outside of the city. Other Western nations packed up their diplomatic installations and headed back to Tripoli, but not the United States. Instead, the U.S. kept its consulate open while reducing its security forces even in the face of intelligence of increasing danger, and escalating attacks on Western assets. …

To ask Clinton’s question again, what difference at this point would it have made? It’s possible that the team could have gotten on the ground in time to repel the second attack, although the timing would have been close. If the hearings focus on this one issue, though, it will miss the real failures in Benghazi.

The administration’s intervention in Libya created a power vacuum in eastern Libya, which it refused to acknowledge, and which eventually led not just to this attack but the near-sacking of Mali, which was prevented only by the French military. Instead, State under Clinton reduced the security at this outpost while our allies fled the city, even while nearby terrorist attacks increased. No one in State or the White House prepared for the obvious al Qaeda interest in attacking vulnerable American assets on the anniversary of 9/11. When the inevitable happened, rather than putting all our assets in play to fight the terrorists, the first impulse of Obama and Clinton seems to have been to deny that a terrorist attack had taken place at all as a means of covering up the gross incompetence of the past year in Libya.

With the administration beating war drums over the use of chemical weapons in Syria, if somewhat half-heartedly, a full and honest accounting of Benghazi and the Obama administration’s Libya policies in general makes a great deal of difference at this or any other point.

The point of the cover-up wasn’t just to preserve the argument that Barack Obama had fatally weakened al-Qaeda, which few really believed anyway. It was to preserve the foreign-policy expertise argument in the 2012 presidential election, and to keep American voters from seeing the true scope of the disaster of Obama’s intervention in Libya. And that matters even more now, with the same administration considering another 30,00o-foot intervention that would end up once again benefiting al-Qaeda affiliates on the ground.

Michael Ramirez argues that it matters in another way — that the cover-up of Benghazi is at least as bad as that of Watergate, and perhaps worse, since no one died in Watergate and we didn’t lose a consulate to terrorists:

Also, be sure to check out Ramirez’ terrific collection of his works: Everyone Has the Right to My Opinion, which covers the entire breadth of Ramirez’ career, and it gives fascinating look at political history. Read my review here, and watch my interviews with Ramirez here and here. And don’t forget to check out the entire Investors.com site, which has now incorporated all of the former IBD Editorials, while individual investors still exist.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/07/wapo-fact-checker-who-rewrote-the-talking-points/feed/226259146US to increase aid to Syrian rebels after key group merges with al-Qaedahttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/10/us-to-increase-aid-to-syrian-rebels-after-key-group-merges-with-al-qaeda/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/10/us-to-increase-aid-to-syrian-rebels-after-key-group-merges-with-al-qaeda/#commentsWed, 10 Apr 2013 16:01:34 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=254142For some reason, American politicians in both parties want to see the US intervene to some extent in Syria’s civil war, even after the disastrous intervention in Libya that almost made Mali an al-Qaeda state. Only a French military intervention prevented that outcome, and that may still only be temporary, but more on that in a minute. The Associated Press reports that the Obama administration will increase “non-lethal” aid to Syrian rebels in the near future, although the timing is still murky:

The Obama administration’s next step in aid to Syrian rebels is expected to be a broader package of nonlethal assistance, including body armor and night-vision goggles, as the U.S. grapples for ways to stem the bloodshed from Syria’s civil war.

Administration officials say an announcement of the new aid is not imminent. But Secretary of StateJohn Kerry says the administration had been holding intense talks on how to boost assistance to the rebels fighting forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“Those efforts have been very much front and center in our discussions in the last week in Washington,” Kerry said Tuesday, a day before meeting with Syrian opposition leaders in London. “I’m not sure what the schedule is, but I do believe that it’s important for us to try to continue to put the pressure on President Assad and to try to change his calculation.”

The United Nations estimates more than 70,000 people have been killed during more than two years of fighting between rebels and government forces.

Britain and France have already been shipping armor, night-vision goggles and other military-style equipment to the rebels.

Er, this isn’t “military-style” equipment. It’s actual military equipment, and while it won’t kill anyone directly, its use isn’t for hunting squirrels and possum, either. The use of that equipment is intended to make the rebel forces more lethal, and its provision allows the rebels to use their existing funds on guns and artillery to pair up with all that non-lethal equipment.

And just who are the rebel forces fighting in Syria? The most effective of them, Jabhat al-Nusra, just announced a merger with al-Qaeda in Iraq, the very forces we spent most of a decade fighting just across the border. In fact, our partners in Baghdad are still fighting AQI:

The leader of an Islamic extremist rebel group in Syria pledged allegiance on Wednesday to al-Qaida and its leader for the first time.

Abu Mohammad al-Golani, head of Jabhat al-Nusra or the Nusra Front, confirmed his rebel group was tied to al-Qaida in Iraq in an audio message posted on militant websites.

Al-Qaida in Iraq said Tuesday it had joined forces with the Nusra Front — the most effective of a disparate patchwork of rebel groups fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. He said the new alliance would be called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

In my column for The Week, I marvel at the inability of both the Obama administration and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to learn a lesson from the results of the lightweight intervention in Libya:

Terrorist networks in eastern Libya, which had once provided al Qaeda in Iraq with thousands of suicidal recruits, had barely been controlled by Gadhafi; after his fall, they took over the entire area. Western nations, including our NATO partners, bailed out of the same Benghazi the intervention had been designed to protect, and the U.S. lost its consulate and four Americans to a terrorist attack there. The terrorist networks then turned their attention to neighboring Mali and sacked Timbuktu, forcing the French to stage a military intervention to keep al Qaeda from creating a terrorist state.

One might think that because of this, the doctrine of disengaged interventions had been completely discredited. Not so. The U.S. continues to mull over a replay of the Libya intervention in Syria, where the tyrant Bashar al-Assad is trying to retain his grip on power in the middle of a civil war. Politicians in both parties have urged President Obama to arm the rebels, fund the opposition, and/or impose no-fly zones to cripple Assad’s military capabilities.

As I wrote yesterday, our “sovereign partner” in Iraq can’t believe the US still hasn’t learned its lesson about low-footprint interventions and terrorism:

In the same essay, Maliki marveled at how the U.S. could possibly consider siding with the Syrian opposition when the U.S. and Iraq are trying to stamp out its affiliates across the border. “We have been mystified by what appears to be the widespread belief in the United States that any outcome in Syria that removes President Bashar al-Assad from power will be better than the status quo,” Maliki wrote. “A Syria controlled in whole or part by al Qaeda and its affiliates — an outcome that grows more likely by the day — would be more dangerous to both our countries than anything we’ve seen up to now.” To press his point, Maliki pointed to another minimal-footprint intervention of a generation earlier. “Americans should remember,” Maliki warned, “that an unintended consequence of arming insurgents in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets was turning the country over to the Taliban and al Qaeda.”

Assad is a brutal dictator, no question — but will a rebellion led by al-Qaeda be a better replacement? Maybe we should answer that before dropping “military-style” equipment that will make AQ more effective.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/10/us-to-increase-aid-to-syrian-rebels-after-key-group-merges-with-al-qaeda/feed/40254142France drives Islamist terrorists out of Timbuktu, signal slowdown of operationshttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/29/france-drives-islamist-terrorists-out-of-timbuktu-signal-slowdown-of-operations/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/29/france-drives-islamist-terrorists-out-of-timbuktu-signal-slowdown-of-operations/#commentsTue, 29 Jan 2013 17:31:19 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=241652Residents of Timbuktu celebrated today as French troops liberated the fabled city from the grip of Islamist terrorists and Touareg rebels, ending ten months of control by the uprising. With this victory in hand, France is now signaling that they will reduce their offensive operations in Mali:

The rapid advance to Timbuktu, a day after French and African troops took firm control of the former rebel stronghold of Gao, may spell the beginning of the end of France’s major involvement in the conflict here.

The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, was a little more cautious than the mayor in his assessment of the situation in Timbuktu on Monday evening, saying on television station TF1: “French and Malian forces are liberating the city. It’s not completely finished, but it’s well on its way.”

The French president, François Hollande, suggested on Monday that French troops might soon stop their northward advance, leaving it to African soldiers to pursue the militants into their redoubts in the desert north. “We are winning this battle,” Mr. Hollande said in televised remarks. “When I say, ‘We,’ this is the Malian army, this is the Africans, supported by the French.”

He continued, “Now, the Africans can take over.”

Or perhaps more Western efforts will take their place. The US will be increasing its drone presence significantly with a new base in North Africa soon, perhaps in nearby Niger. That will boost intelligence gathering in the Sahel, where Islamists had a nearly year-long run of success, and could also serve as a base for offensive operations against the same networks operating in Mali and other nations:

The U.S. military is planning a new drone base in Africa that would expand its surveillance of al-Qaeda fighters and other militants in northern Mali, a development that would escalate American involvement in a fast-spreading conflict.

The escalation comes rather soon after Barack Obama declared an “end to war” in his inaugural speech last week. This looks like an expansion of the same war the US has been fighting since 9/11. Instead of fighting them with troops on the ground, we’ll be fighting with drones in the air. That may be an improvement, depending on your view of drone warfare, but it’s still a war.

Britain is prepared to take the risk of sending a “sizeable amount” of troops to Mali and neighbouring West African countries as David Cameron offers strong support to France in its operation to drive Islamist militants from its former colony. …

Britain is prepared to provide hundreds of troops to help the operation and is considering a few options:

• Forming part of an EU military training mission in Mali. The British contribution to this would be in the “tens”, according to Downing Street.

• Training troops from the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) in neighbouring countries for possible operations on Mali. This is likely to be the main focus of Britain’s contribution because Ecowas members include many countries with strong links to Britain. British troops could be used to train Nigerian forces.

• Providing “force protection” for the trainers. This would be armed protection but would not amount to a combat role.

Looks like the West is getting serious about the Sahel, a situation they largely created by decapitating the Qaddafi regime without any plan to secure Libya and avoid the inevitable power vacuum that allowed these terrorist networks to spread and take control.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/29/france-drives-islamist-terrorists-out-of-timbuktu-signal-slowdown-of-operations/feed/17241652White House, Pentagon split on AQ in Mali?http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/22/white-house-pentagon-split-on-aq-in-mali/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/22/white-house-pentagon-split-on-aq-in-mali/#commentsTue, 22 Jan 2013 13:01:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=240266With the terrorist networks of eastern Libya unleashed, no one questions the threat that they pose to stability in North Africa. Both the White House and Pentagon agree that al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, the most virulent of these and a long-standing branch of Osama bin Laden’s network, could do a tremendous amount of damage. The question for the White House, according to the Los Angeles Times, is whether they pose much of a threat outside of the region. So far, they’re inclined to say no, and resist efforts to confront AQIM:

Some top Pentagon officials and military officers warn that without more aggressive U.S. action, Mali could become a haven for extremists, akin to Afghanistan before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Militants in Mali, “if left unaddressed, … will obtain capability to match their intent — that being to extend their reach and control and to attack American interests,” Army Gen. Carter Ham, head of the U.S. Africa Command, said in an interview.

But many of Obama’s top aides say it is unclear whether the Mali insurgents, who include members of the group Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, threaten the U.S.

Those aides also worry about being drawn into a messy and possibly long-running conflict against an elusive enemy in Mali, a vast landlocked country abutting the Sahara desert, just as U.S. forces are withdrawing from Afghanistan.

“No one here is questioning the threat that AQIM poses regionally,” said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing internal deliberations. “The question we all need to ask is, what threat do they pose to the U.S. homeland? The answer so far has been none.”

So far. The same could have been said in Afghanistan, after our intervention in that country drove the Soviet army into retreat and the Soviet Union into collapse in the late 1980s. The US and the world benefited from the collapse of that tyranny, but less than ten years later, the failed state of Afghanistan served as a base for the AQ core that launched deadly attacks on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, two American embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, and of course 9/11.

Maybe someone can remind us what we got out of the collapse of Libya? Nothing — no geopolitical advantage, no economic advantage, nothing except the temporary halt of Moammar Qaddafi’s offensive against Benghazi, a city where the US can no longer raise its flag in peace. The question asked above by this administration official should have been applied to our war on Libya in 2011. In large part, we (including NATO) unleashed AQIM and other terrorist groups to march across the Sahel by turning Libya into another failed state, even though we knew at the time that terrorist networks had been establishing themselves in the eastern part of the country. Without a central government in Tripoli, they have assumed control and are now spreading their tentacles across northern Africa.

AQIM doesn’t pose a threat to the US homeland at the moment, and probably won’t for at least a few years. They have already made northern Africa a danger zone for the West, though, and they’ll threaten Europe soon enough. It’s only a matter of time before that threat migrates to the US. Maybe the next time we face a situation like Libya, we’ll think about the long-term consequences of decapitating regimes in countries and regions where Islamist terror networks would operate with impunity when given the opportunity, and we could avoid having to decide whether we need to rush to fight AQIM on their turf or wait until they want to fight on ours.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/22/white-house-pentagon-split-on-aq-in-mali/feed/24240266The Libyan boomerang in Malihttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/19/the-libyan-boomerang-in-mali/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/19/the-libyan-boomerang-in-mali/#commentsSat, 19 Jan 2013 19:31:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=239908The history of the last thirty years of American policy in the Middle East and North Africa can be summed up in two words: unintended consequences. The US has found itself pressured by outside events into interventions that have ended up backfiring in substantial ways.

In most cases, one can argue with good reason that the US advanced other policies that more than compensated for the complications. In Afghanistan, we armed the rebels in order to help bring down the Soviet Union. We initially invaded Iraq to repel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and to protect Saudi Arabian oil fields, which led to the necessity of doing it all over again twelve years later when Hussein refused to abide by the terms of the cease-fire. We invaded Afghanistan ourselves to deprive al-Qaeda of a safe haven and to find and punish the people responsible for 9/11 and the attacks on the USS Cole, Khobar Towers, and two embassies in Africa during the 1990s. All of those decisions produced serious negative consequences for the US, but we could argue that we at least gainedsomething through them.

The blowback from our decision to intervene in Libya and in Mali (and not just recently either) don’t have any silver linings apparent at the moment, though. The Financial Times calls this one of our “most embarrassing boomerangs,” and it’s almost impossible to refute that conclusion:

Events this week in Algeria, where Islamic militants took dozens of western hostages at a gas plant, and last week in Mali where France was forced to step in to prevent an Islamist takeover of the capital, Bamako, have underlined how right Washington was to be concerned and just how ineffectual subsequent strategies to contain the problem were.

To the dismay of the US, junior Malian officers trained as part of $620m pan-Sahelian counter-terrorism initiative launched in 2002 to help four semi-desert states resist Islamic militancy took part in a coup in March last year. Others among them defected to the Tuareg revolt that eventually led to a coalition of Islamist militias, allied with Algerian militants from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, capturing the northern two-thirds of Mali.

One can still argue that the attempt to bolster anti-Islamist governments in the region was a calculated risk, and that the failure of the earlier initiatives didn’t make matters much worse. After all, the reason why we started sinking money into Mali was to prevent what was seen as a reasonably likely Islamist overthrow, or perhaps worse, the kind of destabilization by Islamist forces that turned Somalia into a failed state for a generation. We didn’t put combat troops on the ground, so at worst we spent $620 million in postponing the near-inevitable.

However, that’s not the limit of American intervention. Our actions in the Arab Spring by dumping our ally in Egypt and in launching a war against Libya radically changed the calculus in the Sahel. Ten months ago, the consequences of decapitating the Qaddafi regime for Mali and the rest of the Sahel was obvious, as Daniel Larison warned:

But the Libyan war’s worst impact may have occurred outside of Libya. The neighboring country of Mali, which also happens to support U.S. counter-terrorist efforts in western Africa, has been roiled by a new Tuareg insurgency fueled by the influx of men and weapons after Gadhafi’s defeat, providing the Tuareg rebels with much more sophisticated weaponry than they had before. This new upheaval benefits al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), and the Tuareg uprising threatens the territorial integrity of Mali. The rebellion has also displaced nearly 200,000 civilians in a region that is already at risk of famine, and refugees from Mali are beginning to strain local resources in Niger, where most of them have fled. “Success” in Libya is creating a political and humanitarian disaster in Mali and Niger.

The actual boomerang didn’t come from the military training the US provided in the Sahel, which was always going to be a calculated risk against a variety of poor outcomes. The boomerang in this case came from our extremely ill-advised and reckless intervention in Libya, which turned that nation into a failed state and sent tentacles of radicalism throughout the Sahel. And what did we gain from the Libyan adventure and the revolution we blessed in Egypt by tossing a 30-year ally to the wolves? In the latter, we now have leadership that feels entirely comfortable using eliminationist rhetoric against Israel; in the former, we have a burned-out consulate, four dead Americans, and a central government whose writ won’t run in half the country. Our policies in the last two years in this region have emboldened our enemies and disillusioned our allies, and in this case we didn’t get anything at all in trade for the unintended consequences we have reaped.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/19/the-libyan-boomerang-in-mali/feed/35239908CBS: Algeria hostage situation “deteriorating”; Update: Terrorists claim helicopter strafing killed 34 hostageshttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/17/cbs-algeria-hostage-situation-deteriorating/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/17/cbs-algeria-hostage-situation-deteriorating/#commentsThu, 17 Jan 2013 13:37:23 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=239437CBS reports that the hostage situation at an Algerian natural-gas facility may be deteriorating — but for whom? Twenty hostages have escaped, according to the AP, including some of the Americans, but the Algerian military wounded two Japanese hostages in an attempt to end the standoff with Islamist terrorists. Al Jazeera spoke with the terrorists, who got some of the remaining hostages to demand that Algerian forces withdraw:

On Thursday, the Al Jazeera television network spoke via telephone to three purported hostages, and to a man identifying himself as Aboul Baraa, who said he was the Katibat Moulathamine commander leading the operation at the Amenas gas field.

“Yesterday, the Algerian army deliberately opened fire and they injured some of the hostages from Japan and South Korea,” Baraa told Al Jazeera. “If the army withdrew from the area, lifted this siege, and abandoned their obstinate approach, this can open the door for negotiations with governments of the hostages’ countries.”

A man identifying himself as a Japanese hostage told the network that he and a Norwegian hostage had been wounded by sniper fire. Two others, who identified themselves as a Briton and an Irish national, said they had communicated to their respective embassies that the situation was “deteriorating,” and urged the Algerian military to pull back from the confrontation and stop engaging the kidnappers.

The Irishman said the “message does not seem to be getting through,” warning that the incoming fire from Algerian troops was continuing, “up until recently, about 10 minutes ago, they were still firing into the camp.”

It was impossible to confirm the identities of the hostages, or whether they were being forced to make their statements under duress. The men said their captors were treating them well.

Actually, from that description it’s difficult to tell whether the situation is deteriorating for the Algerian forces or for the terrorists. The plea from the terrorists to back off so that negotiations can start on their demands sounds a little desperate. And it’s possible to overplay the “deteriorating” hand, too, because Western nations won’t stand idly by if they believe that Algerian forces can’t resolve the situation. It’s a recipe for an intervention by people the terrorists won’t see coming.

Update: The terrorists now claim that an Algerian helicopter attack killed 34 hostages and 14 of the al-Qaeda terrorists:

Thirty-four hostages and 14 of their al Qaeda-linked kidnappers were killed on Thursday in an air strike by the Algerian armed forces, Mauritania’s ANI news agency reported, citing one of the kidnappers holding captives at a desert gas field.

It was not immediately possible to independently verify the information from the agency, which has close contact with the group which has claimed responsibility for the mass kidnapping.

Islamist militants have told a Mauritanian news outlet that Algerian military helicopters strafed the gas complex where they are holding hostages, killing 35 of the foreigners and 15 of the kidnappers.

The spokesman for the Masked Brigade, which had earlier claimed responsibility for the assault Wednesday on the gas complex deep in the Sahara desert, said Thursday that Abou El Baraa, the leader of the kidnappers, was also killed in the helicopter attack. …

The militant spokesman said the kidnappers were attacked by Algerian helicopters when they attempted to leave the complex.

There isn’t any independent confirmation, but that last part sounds like a bit of propaganda.

Update II: Here’s a little more fodder for skepticism. The Washington Post also picked up on the hostage-escape story, and the numbers aren’t adding up:

The state-run Algerian news agency said 30 Algerian workers managed to flee their captors at the In Amenas gas complex. The Associated Press quoted an unidentified Algerian security official as saying at least 20 foreigners, including Americans and Europeans, escaped later in the day. Private Algerian news outlets reported that 15 foreigners were able to escape. …

The militants seized the hostages, including as many as seven Americans, in a brazen attack that they said was in retaliation for France’s military intervention in neighboring Mali, where French forces have joined Malian government troops in battling armed Islamists who have taken over much of northern Mali.

The militants claimed to have seized 41 foreigners at the complex. The Algerian government asserted that a little more than 20 foreigners were captured.

That sounds like almost the entire contingent of hostages had already escaped. Perhaps a few were left, but even if 41 foreigners had initially been captured, the escape of 15-20 would have left the terrorists with a lot fewer than 35 to be killed in a helicopter attack.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/17/cbs-algeria-hostage-situation-deteriorating/feed/39239437Report: Multiple Americans among hostages held by jihadis after BP plant is seized over France’s Mali intervention; Update: Malian government asked U.S. to intervene last weekhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/16/report-multiple-americans-among-hostages-held-by-jihadis-after-bp-plant-is-seized-over-frances-mali-intervention/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/16/report-multiple-americans-among-hostages-held-by-jihadis-after-bp-plant-is-seized-over-frances-mali-intervention/#commentsWed, 16 Jan 2013 20:13:45 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=239316The number of Americans could be as high as seven but the State Department hasn’t specified yet. Two workers, one British and one French, are reportedly already dead. Algeria’s a clever choice of targets, not only because France is using the country’s airspace for strikes in Mali but because putting Algerians at risk over French military action is bound to stoke old resentments. Step one in pushing the west out of Mali is turning local opinion against them. Step two is hitting westerners where they live to try to turn opinion at home against intervention too. Taking western workers hostage in an allied north African country does both simultaneously.

According to USA Today, the jihadis are from Mali — which is 600 miles from the BP plant — and negotiations are already under way:

Algerian forces surrounded the kidnappers and were negotiating for the release of the hostages, an Algerian security official based in the region told the Associated Press, adding that the militants had come from Mali. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

According to the AP, the jihadis might not be from Mali and Algeria has sworn never, ever to negotiate with them:

Algerian forces have surrounded the complex and the state news agency reported a bit more than 20 people were being held, including Americans, Britons, Norwegians, French and Japanese, citing the local authorities.

“Algeria will not respond to terrorist demands and rejects all negotiations,” Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia said on television. He denied that the militants were from Mali or Libya, possibly suggesting they were from Algeria itself.

There are, allegedly, 41 hostages in all. A spokesman for the jihadi group, which was founded by a former leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, says they have seven captives at the plant and the rest at the residential complex where plant workers live, which complicates things for special operations planning. The spokesman also claims they’ve planted mines around the refinery to prevent any ground attack. I wonder how long Obama will give the Algerian military to try to resolve this before he decides his “Al Qaeda is on the run” talking point requires American action.

France, incidentally, vowed yesterday to keep troops in Mali until stability is restored; French soldiers were on their way today to Diabaly, the southern Malian town seized earlier this week by jihadis, to engage “direct combat” to try to retake it. Jihadis are countering by spreading out inside the town and embedding with local families to maximize their human-shield protection. (“We are in a classic counterinsurrectionary situation,” said one French military expert.) Why commit to a war as ugly as intractable as that? Because, say the French, it can’t wait any longer:

Marc Trévidic—France’s leading investigating magistrate on Islamist terrorism tells TIME that northern Mali and the wider Sahel had become such a vivid arena of jihadi recruitment, combat, terror training, and control that it’s threat to African and European security was too great to ignore any longer. Allowing it to develop further, Trévidic argues, would have been tantamount to letting a pre-9/11 Afghanistan flourish in a place just a few hours away from Europe by plane. “We know individuals left France for Mali in order to join Islamists in the north for training, and know people had been tasked with creating recruitment networks for that jihad,” says Trévidic, whose new book, Terrorists: The Seven Pillars of Madness, examines various aspects of radical development—and surveillance of budding extremists. “That flow has increased over the months, and it’s clear that stream will eventually reverse itself as trained terror operatives head back for France and Europe. It has to be cut.”

They’re expecting attempted terror attacks in France too, of course, possibly by African jihadis traveling to Europe or possibly by jihadis who are already in France and willing to act at the behest of African jihadi groups. Meanwhile, the negotiations in Algeria continue. Stand by for updates.

Update:Reuters explains the economic significance of the target and how the west’s last intervention inadvertently helped place it in jeopardy:

The attack could have implications for security across the whole of Algeria’s energy sector, which supplies about a quarter of Europe’s natural gas imports and exports millions of barrels of crude oil each year.

Such an attack would require a large and heavily armed insurgent force with a degree of freedom to move around, all elements that al Qaeda has not previously had.

However, the conflict in neighboring Libya in 2011 changed the balance of force. Security experts say al Qaeda was able to obtain arms, including heavy weapons, from the looted arsenals of former leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Update: With America’s last attempt to build a counterterror force inside Mali having failed utterly, will Obama respond to requests for a second try?

The besieged government in Mali asked the United States last week for military help to repel al-Qaeda-linked militants, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. The disclosure appeared to contradict earlier U.S. characterizations that only France had been asked to intervene.

“The Malian government made a specific request of the United States, as they did the French, several days ago for assistance in combatting the threat posed by the rebels,” in the country’s north, the State Department official said.

Minor problem: Because the Malian military — which was trained by U.S. forces — overthrew the democratically elected government last year, the U.S. is now barred by law from intervening directly to help. Bear that in mind for when the inevitable stories start appearing at the Times or the Washington Post next month about how Obama is using drones and secret Special Ops to assist them after all. If he can ignore the War Powers Act in Libya, why can’t he ignore this?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/16/report-multiple-americans-among-hostages-held-by-jihadis-after-bp-plant-is-seized-over-frances-mali-intervention/feed/94239316NYT: Jihadis running wild in northern Mali as U.S. counterterror strategy failshttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/14/nyt-jihadis-running-wild-in-northern-mali-as-u-s-counterterror-strategy-fails/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/14/nyt-jihadis-running-wild-in-northern-mali-as-u-s-counterterror-strategy-fails/#commentsMon, 14 Jan 2013 22:51:20 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=238901Via Walter Russell Mead. To follow-up on Ed’s post this morning, with French boots on the ground and America providing logistical support, it’s time to start paying attention to Mali if you aren’t yet. The U.S. strategy here was simple, and familiar: Support the elected government against jihadis by training their army in counterterror operations. So far, so good — until last year, when a bunch of American-trained military commanders joined the rebellion in the north (which was soon taken over by jihadis) and another American-trained commander overthrew the government in a coup. The resulting dynamic, pitting a military autocracy against Islamist nuts, is also familiar from places like Egypt and Syria. And in case you thought otherwise, evidently American training and support can’t prevent it.

One reason Obama’s so eager to move U.S. military assets out of Afghanistan is that the game of whack-a-mole has now moved elsewhere — thanks in part to the western intervention against Qaddafi in Libya:

But all that deliberate planning collapsed swiftly when heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya. They teamed up with jihadists like Ansar Dine, routed poorly equipped Malian forces and demoralized them so thoroughly that it set off a mutiny against the government in the capital, Bamako…

The same American-trained units that had been seen as the best hope of repelling such an advance proved, in the end, to be a linchpin in the country’s military defeat. The leaders of these elite units were Tuaregs — the very ethnic nomads who were overrunning northern Mali…

“The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful,” said another ranking Malian officer, now engaged in combat. “They made the wrong choice,” he said of relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state…

“I was sorely disappointed that a military with whom we had a training relationship participated in the military overthrow of an elected government,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Africa Command, said in a speech at Brown University last month . “There is no way to characterize that other than wholly unacceptable.”

The French moved in last week with 500+ troops and air power in order to halt the jihadis’ drive from the north towards Bamako, the capital. But just yesterday, Al Qaeda and its associates managed to infiltrate and take the town of Diabaly, which is inside southern Mali and was thought to be safely protected by the military. How’d they sneak in there? By crossing over into Mauritania and then circling back behind the army’s lines towards the town. That’s familiar too from Afghanistan, but the problem here is much, much bigger. An enormous swath of north Africa is potentially in play:

The area under the rule of the Islamist fighters is mostly desert and sparsely populated, but analysts say that due to its size and the hostile nature of the terrain, rooting out the extremists here could prove even more difficult than it did in Afghanistan. Mali’s former president has acknowledged, diplomatic cables show, that the country cannot patrol a frontier twice the length of the border between the United States and Mexico.

AQIM operates not just in Mali, but in a corridor along much of the northern Sahel. This 7,000-kilometer (4,300-mile) long ribbon of land runs across the widest part of Africa, and includes sections of Mauritania, Niger, Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and Chad.

“One could come up with a conceivable containment strategy for the Swat Valley,” said Africa expert Peter Pham, an adviser to the U.S. military’s African command center, referring to the region of Pakistan where Taliban fighters once dominated. “There’s no containment strategy for the Sahel, which runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.”

“Al-Qaida never owned Afghanistan,” said a UN diplomat who was held hostage by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb. “They do own northern Mali.” Some experts think the group and its associates now have surface-to-air missiles which they stole from the Malian army bases they overran and, of course, from the Qaddafi weapons depots that were looted in the aftermath of the Libyan revolution. It’s not just AQIM there either: Other jihadi groups like Ansar Dine are flowing into the north of the country, partly because it was a safe haven and partly because it’s now quickly turning into the hottest global flashpoint with the infidel crusaders. (Jihadi leaders are threatening France, of course.) What Obama, Chuck Hagel, and John Brennan plan to do about all of this, especially in an age of defense cuts, is unclear, although it’s a safe bet that the left’s dream of ending the age of drone warfare will have to wait. According to the Times, one plan favored by U.S. strategists is to target the jihadi groups’ leaders in hopes that taking them out will cause the groups to fall apart. Another option is to wait until an Awakening-type backlash develops among the local as they’re treated to a taste of the glories of sharia, but how you’d go about organizing that Awakening without many, many troops on the ground is also unclear. You see, though, how one intervention can beget another: Obama went into Libya to oust Qaddafi because he wanted to purchase some goodwill with Muslims during the Arab Spring, and now he’ll likely have to go into Mali to manage the spillover — which Islamists will demagogue to try to destroy any goodwill America has with Muslims after the Arab Spring.

Anyway. As I say, it’s time to get up to speed if you’ve been ignoring this. National Journal has a useful primer to help.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/14/nyt-jihadis-running-wild-in-northern-mali-as-u-s-counterterror-strategy-fails/feed/82238901Islamists vow to strike “at the heart” of France after Mali interventionhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/14/islamists-vow-to-strike-at-the-heart-of-france-after-mali-intervention/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/14/islamists-vow-to-strike-at-the-heart-of-france-after-mali-intervention/#commentsMon, 14 Jan 2013 17:01:57 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=238773Ten months after condemning a military coup in Mali, the Obama administration may end up having to ride to its rescue. Islamists in the West African nation have begun a new offensive after France sent its military to fight the insurgency, and have now sworn to open a new front in the war in France itself:

Islamist forces on Monday launched a fresh attack in Mali’s government-held south and vowed to strike “at the heart” of France to avenge a fierce military offensive against them.

Security sources reported the jihadists had attacked Diabali, some 400 kilometres (250 miles) north of the capital Bamako, on the fourth day of the French campaign, which has led to heavy losses in the extremists’ ranks.

“The Islamists attacked the town of Diabali today (Monday). They came from the Mauritanian border where they were bombed by the French army,” said a Malian security source on condition of anonymity.

Despite intensive aerial bombardments by French warplanes, Islamist insurgents grabbed more territory in Mali on Monday and got much closer to the capital, French and Malian authorities said.

In the latest setback for the government of Mali, the al-Qaida-linked extremists overran the garrison village of Diabaly in central Mali, France’s defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in Paris Monday. The rebels “took Diabaly after fierce fighting and resistance from the Malian army that couldn’t hold them back.”

The Malian military is in disarray and has let many towns fall with barely a shot fired since the insurgency began almost a year ago in the northwest African nation.

France on Sunday hit northern strongholds of Islamist rebels in Mali, intensifying its military push into the West African nation as neighboring countries rushed to deploy troops to fight groups allied with al Qaeda.

Fighter jets from France, which engaged its troops on Friday in response to an urgent appeal from Mali President Dioncounda Traoré, attacked targets deep in northern territories controlled by Islamist groups, notably the large city of Gao near the front. The French also targeted sites along the border with Mauritania, as well as Kidal, a remote trading post near Algeria, as it widened a military campaign in the Texas-size desert region.

France has requested aid from the US on intelligence and logistics. The Obama administration may approve that aid very soon, according to the Wall Street Journal, although stopping short of actual combat operations:

The Obama administration moved Sunday toward approving a limited show of support for France’s military campaign in Mali, readying surveillance drones and other air-intelligence assets for possible deployment within days, U.S. and European officials said.

The U.S. isn’t considering sending ground troops to Mali, and the officials said any American aircraft involved in the French campaign wouldn’t conduct airstrikes. …

The limited American response to France’s request for military support reflects White House concerns about being drawn into a new conflict when it is focused on extricating itself from the 11-year-old war in Afghanistan. The White House also has balked at intervening militarily in Syria.

Any deployment in support of France’s campaign in Mali would be the first U.S. involvement in a new military campaign since Libya in 2011.

It’s interesting that the WSJ should mention the Libyan intervention. Ten months ago, Daniel Larison pointed out that the Islamist insurgency in Mali resulted in large part from the NATO intervention in Libya:

But the Libyan war’s worst impact may have occurred outside of Libya. The neighboring country of Mali, which also happens to support U.S. counter-terrorist efforts in western Africa, has been roiled by a new Tuareg insurgency fueled by the influx of men and weapons after Gadhafi’s defeat, providing the Tuareg rebels with much more sophisticated weaponry than they had before. This new upheaval benefits al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), and the Tuareg uprising threatens the territorial integrity of Mali. The rebellion has also displaced nearly 200,000 civilians in a region that is already at risk of famine, and refugees from Mali are beginning to strain local resources in Niger, where most of them have fled. “Success” in Libya is creating a political and humanitarian disaster in Mali and Niger.

And Larison put “success” in scare quotes eight months before the attack on our consulate in Benghazi made it clear just how “successful” Obama’s war on Moammar Qaddafi actually was. Now we’re going to have to intervene on behalf of a military junta to fix what we broke by turning Libya into a failed state with terrorist networks in effective charge of the eastern section of the country, and energizing the Islamists inside and outside of Libya.

Exit question: What exactly does Chuck Hagel think of this latest intervention?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/14/islamists-vow-to-strike-at-the-heart-of-france-after-mali-intervention/feed/38238773One year later, Libya mess spreading guns and violence into Malihttp://hotair.com/archives/2012/03/22/one-year-later-libya-mess-spreading-guns-and-violence-into-mali/
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/03/22/one-year-later-libya-mess-spreading-guns-and-violence-into-mali/#commentsThu, 22 Mar 2012 15:35:39 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=186105On Sunday, the one-year anniversary of the declaration by Barack Obama of American military intervention in Libya passed without much notice. The reason Obama and NATO gave for their undeclared war on Moammar Qaddafi was the “responsibility to protect” civilian populations from military force by the dictatorship, known as R2P, and to free Libya from the grip of the tyrant, which was supposed to produce an orderly transition to a democratic government. As Daniel Larison points out, that hasn’t exactly come to pass. Instead, competing militias run Libya, and now guns are flowing into Mali — which threatens to destabilize a key Western ally in the war against al-Qaeda:

But the Libyan war’s worst impact may have occurred outside of Libya. The neighboring country of Mali, which also happens to support U.S. counter-terrorist efforts in western Africa, has been roiled by a new Tuareg insurgency fueled by the influx of men and weapons after Gadhafi’s defeat, providing the Tuareg rebels with much more sophisticated weaponry than they had before. This new upheaval benefits al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), and the Tuareg uprising threatens the territorial integrity of Mali. The rebellion has also displaced nearly 200,000 civilians in a region that is already at risk of famine, and refugees from Mali are beginning to strain local resources in Niger, where most of them have fled. “Success” in Libya is creating a political and humanitarian disaster in Mali and Niger.

The R2P principle isn’t faring well either:

Paradoxically, the Libyan war and its aftermath have had the unintended consequence of undermining the doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (R2P) that was originally used to justify the intervention. Many advocates of intervention believed Western involvement would strengthen the norm that sovereignty may be limited to protect a civilian population from large-scale loss of life. Instead, the Libyan intervention helped discredit that idea.

A key requirement of the “responsibility to protect” is that intervening governments assume the “responsibility to rebuild” in the wake of military action, but this was a responsibility that the intervening governments never wanted and haven’t accepted. All of this has proven to skeptical governments, including emerging democratic powers such as Brazil and India, that the doctrine can and will be abused to legitimize military intervention while ignoring its other requirements. The Libyan experience has soured many major governments around the world on R2P, and without their support in the future, it will become little more than a façade for the preferred policies of Western governments.

Thus stands the real absurdity — the choice to apply R2P in Libya. Qaddafi was certainly a tyrant, and wanted to conduct massive military action against his own people to keep his regime from collapsing. But Qaddafi was at that time no acute threat to the Western governments who toppled him through the lengthy bombing campaign. On the other hand, Syria’s Bashar Assad helps Iran run two terror networks in Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which aim at Western interests in the region, and who is now conducting the exact same kind of campaign that Qaddafi threatened — with the Western governments not lifting a finger to stop it.

I’m not arguing for military intervention in Syria, which might have produced the exact same consequences as it did in Libya (and as the diplomatic intervention did in Egypt) by putting radical Islamists in charge. Even if we wanted to stage such an intervention, we have neither the resources nor the political credibility to do so after the embarrassingly lengthy NATO campaign in Libya and Western reluctance to deal with the consequences of the aftermath. However, if we had thought about the long-term consequences of intervention in both Libya and Egypt a year ago, we might have held our strength for a place where it mattered most and where it might have done some good — Syria, or even Iran. Instead, we’re perceived as so weak and ineffective that Russia felt bold enough to land troops in Syria to support Assad in the guise of “anti-terror” units.

Small wonder no one wanted to talk about the one-year anniversary of this intervention.

“We call for the immediate restoration of constitutional rule in Mali, including full civilian authority over the armed forces and respect for the country’s democratic institutions and traditions,” the White House said in a statement.